If only Peter Goldmark would follow this example instead of increasing the institutional infrastructure of bureaucracy at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. The following article is an example of a state with genuine interest in cost reduction.
Reposted from Government Technology
Jul 31, 2009, By Andy Opsahl, Features Editor
The Oakland County, Mich., Department of Information Technology has slashed more than $8 million in annual operating costs since 2003. The department has done it again -- cutting nearly $600,000 from its IT budget -- with its Cost Reduction/Investment Blog that lets employees make budgetary suggestions. Deployed earlier this year on the county's intranet, the blog helped the municipality win the top honor for counties with populations of half a million or more at the Center for Digital Government's Digital Counties Survey awards ceremony in Nashville, Tenn., on July 26.
"Employees go out and do the research, provide the links and everything necessary to vet it properly," explained Phil Bertolini, CIO of Oakland County.
Bertolini meets weekly with a steering committee to analyze the suggestions, and responds to employees via the cost reduction blog. For example, the county eliminated $325,000 a year after an employee suggested freezing software licensing and maintenance services for the government's PeopleSoft/Oracle enterprise resource planning software (ERP). By freezing the license, Oakland County stopped paying for and receiving software updates. Having canceled the maintenance services as well, the county's in-house IT staff maintains the ERP, which remains in the last updated version from PeopleSoft before the license was frozen. The county now contracts with a separate vendor to provide only emergency support services.
Several other county agencies have imitated the IT department's cost reduction blog and are already producing savings, according to Bertolini. He said he couldn't specify how much money was saved in other agencies so far.
MJ
